Tim Grobaty: Campaign trail leads to Historical Society of Long Beach

HISTORY HITS 50: The campaign trail in our Romp for the 5th District took us to a party at Parkers' Lighthouse Tuesday evening to celebrate the Historical Society of Long Beach's 50th anniversary.

Oddly, we saw none of our opponents, including one who's written three picture books on Long Beach history (she will surely use the weak excuse that she had a council meeting at the time), at the tribute to our town's keeper of its sacred legacy.

We sucked up backers like a Dyson hoovering up confetti and even won a raffle prize - a stunning framed photo of opening night at the Crest Theater on Atlantic Avenue in 1948. Our pop was an usher there back then.

In the past several years, HSLB has been rocketing to prominence in town, acquiring a spectacular permanent home in Bixby Knolls and scoring a huge coup in taking more than 1,400 bound volumes of Long Beach's greatest newspapers - the Press-Telegram, the Independent and the Sun - going back to the 1890s off our hands.

We had a great time chatting up some of our future former colleagues, including past councilmen Doug Drummond and current HSLB co-president Evan Braude. Also, in a moment of rare garrulousness, we also hung out with the the society's director Julie Bartolotto and co-president Kristi Fischer, who was in our glorious Wilson High Class of 1973. Oh, the times we had!

If you haven't visited the HSLB offices and galleries at 4260 Atlantic Ave., or want to make a triumphant return to the site, we recommend swinging by on the next First Friday at Bixby Knolls, which falls as early as possible on June 1 when, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., we'll be signing copies of our book, "Long Beach Chronicles," a portion of our profits of which will go to Citizens for a United 5th District (CU5D).

IF ONLY WE WERE DEAD: Dashed. That's what our hopes of having a new park named after us are.

Unrecalled councilman James Johnson of the ham-and-egger 7th District is throwing a name-that-park(s) feature for a mammoth 47-acre park and its 4-acre sidekick.

The incipient recreation area, when finished, will be the biggest park to open in Long Beach in our lifetime, which has already gone for longer than we can remember.

So far, Johnson's office has received a bit more than a dozen ideas, and they're looking for more. Unfortunately, parks may not be named for those among the still living. It's another example of existence discrimination. That'll change once we're elected.

El Dorado Park, the city's megapark, got its name from such an endeavor. We've grown used to it over time, but it seems like a weird idea for a park name. So does Recreation Park, for that matter. So let's bear down this time.

You may get your idea to Johnson's office any number of ways: Call 562-570-7777; send email to District7@JamesJohnsonLB.com; or dash a note off to James Johnson, Long Beach City Hall, 333 W. Ocean Blvd., 14th Floor, Long Beach, CA 90802.

CAMPAIGN UPDATE: You know what's difficult about running for office? Not everyone likes you. We find this almost unbelievable, but it's the truth. While more people have supported the idea of us running for the 5th District council seat, others have sworn to work as hard as a human can work to ensure our horrible and embarrassing defeat.

Some detractors are kinder than others: One reader urged us to stick to writing, which we guess is better than being consigned to the sort of condition that would make us eligible to have a city park named for us.

One reader in particular was so enraged with our idea of going into politics that he sputtered out a sentence that contained the words "efficacy" and "dichotomous" in one four-word stretch. (He also used the words "ridiculously" and "juvenile" consecutively.)

You'd think a genius who tosses big words around like a jailhouse dictionary memorizer would be able to figure out that we couldn't survive any sort of vetting process - the cat issue alone would kill us - and, because we've quit everything from trumpet lessons to the Cub Scouts to a junior-college astronomy class to a long and weeping string of girls and young women, there's no reason to believe that we will have to stamina to ever pursue public office.